AMD Enables Server APU Software to Reimagine the Server

AMD announced it is enabling its accelerated processing units (APU) for next-generation servers through important advancements in software tools developed by AMD and in collaboration with technology partners and the open source community. In his keynote address at APU13, AMD Corporate Fellow Phil Rogers highlighted the significant progress AMD has made in both developing software internally and empowering others to develop software to take advantage of the capabilities of AMD APU technology, which combines industry leading AMD Radeon graphics processing engines with x86 computational processing on a single chip.

“Servers must be efficient, scalable and adaptable to meet the compute characteristics of new and changing workloads. Software applications that leverage server APUs are designed to drive highly efficient, low-power, dense server solutions optimized for highly parallel and multimedia workloads,” said Suresh Gopalakrishnan, corporate vice president and general manager of the Server Business Unit, AMD. “We have evolved our processor roadmap to support this opportunity, and now we are showcasing how the APU software ecosystem is gaining momentum and what developers can do to participate.”

With the realization that server APUs based on Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) are coming to market soon, AMD has developed tools for software developers to take advantage of the benefits that HSA provides. HSA enables the CPU and GPU to work in harmony on a single piece of silicon, seamlessly moving the right tasks to the best-suited processing element with no data transfer penalties and makes more memory available to the GPU so that complex processing tasks can fit in a single node.

“Combining AMD’s upcoming HSA compliant APUs with new east-west fabric architectures, like AMD’s Freedom Fabric and HP’s Moonshot, is a potential game changer for many server-side HPC and big data analytics workloads,” said Paul Teich, CTO and senior analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, a leading high-tech analyst firm.